When Good Money goes Bad

There will be many people who you meet along the way in your life who are doing well in terms of revenue but dislike the customers who generate it for them.

This could be for any number of reasons but the root of the cause is often due to a lack of communication and mutually mismanaged expectations. Their relationship may have started off with a degree of high energy and open enthusiasm but over time, cracks start to appear. And yet, neither party does enough to remedy the situation or kill it. After all, who actually wants lots of broken relationships to deal with?

So instead we accept the status quo and the continued income and leave it to the customer to call it a day.

This gives you the choice of three reactions:

1 – be happy with the outcome

2 – be unhappy with the outcome

3 – be indifferent to the outcome

If you fall into reaction 1 or 2 then you can chose to act upon it. Option 1 shouldn’t be seen as the ‘get out of jail’ as clearly the other party had to go through a period of contemplation on your behalf to get to this point. Option 2 should encourage you to muster up the courage to go and find out how you can learn from it. The situation regardless of which of these two you arrive at should mean you could learn from the experience.

Which brings us to option 3 – if you or a member of your team become indifferent to your customers you need to take immediate action. Indifference is the opposite to love AND hate both of which are emotions that we choose to have but to not feel anything at all means there’s a potential destructive tumour waiting to cripple your business. After all, without customers you have nothing more than a lot of overheads.

Each and every one of your customers; past, present, and future all have something more than you have to give to you to help your business. However, to be one of those people who hide behind the revenue numbers to avoid facing up to the fact they have a bunch of mis-fitting customers means there is something wrong with their business plan. It will only be a matter of time before it is the customer who becomes indifferent to you and leaves you with no place to go.

Make time specifically to go out and see your clients especially when it’s not related to a sale or a problem. Gaining a deeper understanding of who they are and what they are about will help you decide if they are the right fit for the future of your business or not. If it’s the latter, be sure to start thinking about wooing them out of your business into the capable hands of a more acceptable suitor.

It’s your job to ensure the money that flows through your balance sheets is the good kind so that you can enjoy what you do no matter how much or how little revenue you gain.